Published in: Transplantation Proceedings (2007), vol. 39, iss. 8, pp. 2633-2633. Status: Postprint (Author’s Version)
PREFACE
Olivier Detry
Department of Abdominal Surgery and Transplantation,University of Liège Liège, Belgium
Vincent Donckier
Department of Abdominal Surgery Hôspital Erasme, Université Libre de Bruxelles,Brussels, Belgium
In this issue of Transplantation Proceedings, we are pleased to introduce some of the proceedings of the abstracts presented during the 14th annual meeting of the Belgian Transplant Society (BTS), held on March 27, 2007 in Brussels. For this meeting 51 abstracts were submitted and 29 (57%) were accepted for oral presentation. The BTS was created in 1993 by the representatives of the different Belgian universities, as a scientific
organization aiming to share the experiences in basic and clinical research of the different Belgian groups involved in organ transplantation. Belgian universities have always been very active in transplantation. Belgium is a cofounder of the Eurotransplant organization that organizes organ allocation in the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, and more recently Slovenia. The rate of procurement has been always elevated in
Belgium, with an average of 24 organ donors per million inhabitants per year during last years and 26.2 in 2006. These good results might be in part explained by an opting-out (or presumed consent) national law, by the high motivation level of the different transplant centers and by the confidence of the Belgian population in
transplantation.
Yet, Belgian is a small country and opening to other transplant societies is absolutely necessary. Our presence in this issue of Transplantation Proceedings, shared with our colleagues of the Société Francophone de
